09 April 2013

The War Against The Young

Is Obama, inadvertently, building a conservative/libertarian youth movement?

By Victor Davis Hanson

It is
popular wisdom that President Obama’s progressive social agenda is predicated
on widespread support from the younger, hip generation. Certainly, concerns
like gay marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion, the DREAM Act, gun
control, women in combat, and blocking gas and oil exploration and pipeline
transportation all get a lot of play on campuses and in popular culture. And
these wedge issues supposedly represent the future direction of the country — a
wise agenda for liberals eager to cement a majority constituency for decades to
come.

But aside from the common-sense recognition that people become more
conservative as they age and mature — and start paying taxes, and become
financially responsible for their own children’s future — there is just
as much likelihood that Barack Obama may inadvertently be building a
conservative youth movement. Indeed, the new liberalism in all its
economic manifestations is reactionary and anti-youth to the core. The
administration seems aware of the potential paradoxes in this reverse
“What’s the matter with Kansas?” syndrome of young people voting against
their economic interests. Thus follows the constant courting of the hip
and cool Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Lena Dunham, Occupy Wall Streeters, and others
who blend pop culture, sex, youth, energy, and fad — almost anything to
avoid the truth that today’s teenagers are starting out each owing a
lifetime share of the national debt amounting to more than
three-quarters of a million dollars. Those who ran up the debt enjoyed
the borrowing, but won’t be around to pay back their proverbial
fair share.

University tuition has soared well beyond the rate of inflation,
increases brought about by an inexcusable surge in administrative
staffs, the reduction in teaching loads over the last few decades, the
costs of subsidizing overly specialized and esoteric research, all sorts
of costly new race/class/gender explorations, and a general expansion
of non-teaching support staffs. Justification of such escalating costs
was always based on the truism that college degrees represented a wise
lifetime investment that ensured increased salary and better job
security. That may still be true — in the long run — but bleak immediate
employment prospects for those under 25, along with ballooning college
loans, will eventually prompt a reexamination of such received wisdom.
When academics at traditional universities trash private tech schools
and on-line colleges, their criticism is not so much pedagogical as
self-interested.

At some point, the huge campus speaking fees given a Michael Moore or
a John Edwards, the off-topic rants of the English professor, and the
proliferation of x-studies degrees that impart neither expertise
nor marketability will be rethought by young consumers in terms of years
of paying back high-interest student loans for brands that were not
applicable to most employment.

Nearly every week, I receive a letter from a former student seeking
help in finding a job. The common theme is a sense that something in
their education went terribly wrong. Most fear that their present
indebtedness is unsustainable and that their degrees are almost
superfluous in today’s economy. There is also a vague resentment that no
one in the self-interested university honestly apprised them of the
odds stacked against them. It was about ten years ago when a student
wrote me to complain that her professor’s skipping one of her classes
had cost the student, in pro-rated terms, over $150. I wrote back to
remind her to tally as well the interest charges on her tuition debt.
Academics call such calculations consumerism, but students see what has
happened to them as consumer fraud.

Apart from the elite of the Ivy League, most indebted students no
longer look back at their professors and administrators as paragons of
virtue or avatars of social change; instead, they see them as part of an
establishment that sold them a bill of goods, one more interested in
getting ever more customers than in finding jobs for those who bought
their product on credit. The latest job figures show that among
20-to-24-year-olds, unemployment has risen (alone among various age
cohorts) to 13.3 percent. For those in their prime working years (e.g.,
25 to 34) unemployment is still high, at 7.4 percent. National debt per
person has soared to over $53,000, a $20,000 surge in just the first 50
months of the Obama presidency. Most of the borrowing — both the Obama
administration’s new borrowing and the older borrowing for payouts to
those receiving pensions, Medicare, and Social Security — was the
property of the Baby Boomer cohorts.

Those over 50, who mostly run the nation, have popularized something
called “internship,” a non-paid or low-paid apprenticeship that might or
might not eventually lead to employment, but that typically does not
even pay the room and board of the worker in question. Fifty years ago
such “jobs” would have been the source of labor unrest, as thousands hit
the streets to argue that they were little more than indentured serfs,
and their employers virtual feudal lords. Yet few complain today because
these interns are largely middle class, and they have been told that
obedience and subservience are just the sorts of traits that employers
appreciate. In today’s liberal legal universe, a six-figure-salaried
senior female executive can sue for vast sums over a sexist remark
(something akin to the president’s recent quip that California’s
attorney general was the best-looking such officeholder in the nation),
while a penniless student or recent graduate who labors for free has no
legal recourse.

To a generation saddled with college debt and facing bleak job
prospects, the current Democratic hysteria over any sensible reform of
Social Security and Medicare increasingly sounds just as surreal. In
fact, the only question left about reforming entitlements is not if, but
when: whether those in their forties and fifties will share the pain of
cutting back, or whether the escalating burdens of keeping the system
solvent will fall entirely on a younger generation that will have bigger
debts and smaller incomes.

Tomorrow’s public employee is not likely to receive a generous
defined-benefit retirement plan — but will still hear whining from his
far-better-compensated superiors as to how unfair it is to question
whether their own compensation is sustainable. And far fewer in the
future will so easily land a government job at all: In California the
unsustainable cost of the public work force is due not to overstaffing,
but to too few younger taxpayers to meet the state’s
existing obligations, given the lucrative compensation and retirement
packages of a select elder few, who somehow believe that their own
privilege is proof of their egalitarianism. Forgotten in the national
acrimony over unfunded defined-benefit retirement plans for public
employees is that the divide is not public versus private sector, or
left versus right, but older versus younger. For the public unions the
implicit message is something like the following: Keep borrowing to fund
our generation’s unsustainable pensions and, in turn, we may concede
that the next generation will never receive something so bankrupting to
the public purse.

The soon-to-be-$17-trillion debt — run up largely by the Baby Boomer
generation — will lead to decades of budget cutting, inflation, and
higher taxes. A decade from now, as 30-somethings try to buy a home and
raise children while they are still paying off their student loans, they
may wonder why the national burden of repaying the debts of the
better-off falls largely upon themselves. Indeed, a legacy of the Baby
Boomer generation is the idea that it is natural for younger people to
begin life with huge loans — not for a house or a car, but for an
education of dubious market value.

The offspring of well-connected journalists, politicians, academics,
professionals, and celebrities assure us in their documentaries and
op-eds, and through their parents’ voices, that conservatives have lost
the war for America’s youth. They certainly have, at least for a while,
at in-the-news, private liberal-arts campuses. But for the vast majority
of the state-schooled who have no such connections, little if any
expectation of an inheritance, and lots of accumulated debt, there is
nothing liberal about the values inherent in the present economy.

Given a choice between gay marriage, legalization of pot, and the
banning of so-called assault rifles on the one hand, and, on the other, a
good job with lower taxes, most young people will quietly prefer the
latter. For that reason, conservatives should not outbid liberals to
appear cool to new voters, but simply explain that a fair economy for
all generations is no longer on the liberal agenda.